Consumers Plastic Surgery If Recycling Research Is Successful, The Next Bench You Sit On Could Be Made From Your Last Plastic Soda Bottle.

April 8, 1989|By ROBERT HANLEY, New York Times News Service

PISCATAWAY, N.J. -- A new park bench made of sturdy plastic sits in the hallway of a research office at Rutgers University here, an ornamental testament to a useful second life for the plastic-foam cup and hamburger box.

These cups and boxes, the throwaway staples of the fast-food industry, together with supermarket and school cafeteria trays, make up 40 percent of the plastic ``lumber`` used in the bench.

The rest is from plastic bottles, melted and remolded, that once held anti-freeze and detergent, yogurt, liquor and margarine.

For the past year, scientists at the Rutgers Center for Plastics Recycling Research have worked on blending these plastics into planks and posts that someday, they hope, will become an economical substitute for wood in decks, picnic tables, piers and fences.

The experimental research is something of a race for the center, which is a creation of the plastics industry. Its staff wants to prove that polystyrene -- the dominant plastic used in fast-food containers -- has value when recycled.

The motive is to curb any widening of sentiment among environmentalists and politicians to ban polystyrene from use as a food container.

Technology already exists for recycling the more valuable types of plastics, used in soda bottles and in clear jugs for milk, water and fruit juices.

Before tackling polystyrene, the center helped perfect the machinery that shreds those plastics into flakes, and washes and separates them from remnants of bottle caps and paper labels.

Widespread use of plastic packaging is about a decade old, and the public, the industry says, has little awareness that discarded plastic containers are recyclable. As a result, economical methods of collecting and sorting discarded plastics are all but non-existent.

Of the 750 million pounds of plastic soda bottles used and thrown away in the country annually, only 150 million pounds, or about 20 percent, are recycled, Sabourin says.

Nearly all come from the nine states that have deposit laws for plastic bottles: New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, Delaware, Michigan, Oregon and Iowa.

Wellman handles about two-thirds of that volume, he says, transforming the flaked plastic into polyester fiber used in wall-to-wall carpeting, furniture cushions and as insulating fill in comforters and ski jackets.

Aside from fibers, chips of soda-bottle plastic, polyethylene terephthalate, more commonly called PET, can be reused to make bathtubs and shower stalls, boat hulls, electrical wall sockets and plastic panels for cars.

Uses for chips of milk-jug plastic, known as high density polyethylene, or HDPE, include toys, trash cans, flower pots, pipes and pails.

Still, the industry estimates that 99 percent of all discarded plastic containers wind up in landfills, in large measure because only soda bottles and milk jugs have proven new uses.

Because the containers are, in essense, bulky plastic bubbles, they use considerable landfill space. Hence, the value of the research into plastic lumber at the center.

Ten benches matching the center`s hallway ornament recently were shipped from the center to Palm Beach -- the end product of junked plastic packages gathered last summer in a beach-combing bee.

Piled in the center`s workshop are 8-foot plastic planks and posts produced by a Belgian-designed machine that melts plastics to a pudding texture and squeezes it into metal molds. The ``lumber`` is destined for use as fences, signs and walls in an Portland, Ore., environmental park.

``These are all prototypes. We`re still experimenting with a variety of mixes of plastics that scientists once thought were incompatible,`` says Dr. Thomas J. Nosker, manager of the project.

Questions that remain unanswered about the ``lumber`` include its durability and ability to hold fasteners over the years.

``We have to know that nails won`t spit themselves back out,`` Nosker says.

``Will there be warping or discoloring?`` adds Ted Kasternakis, the project`s research engineer.

``How will the sun change the color? Will there be chipping or cracking? It`s all new territory and we have to get a handle on it,`` Kasternakis says.

The center was formed in 1985 by the Plastics Recycling Foundation, a non- profit industry organization. It provides 42 percent of the center`s $2.3 million budget. New Jersey provides 30 percent, Rutgers, 19 percent, and the rest is from the National Science Foundation and other states.

But even with the center`s innovations, officials say plastics face another recycling hurdle: its light weight -- the quality that made plastics an economical replacement for glass containers. Unless systems are created to sort containers by plastic type, compact them and collect them, the cost of carrying the bulky containers could jeopardize the value scientists may create for recycled products.

For example, discarded plastic soda bottles are worth three times as much as shattered glass bottles. But a standard garbage truck can carry about 30,000 pounds of crushed glass, worth $600, and only about 1,000 pounds of unshredded plastic bottles, worth $60, according to Guy Watson, manager of technical assistance in New Jersey`s Office of Recycling.

``That`s the crux of the problem to municipal officials,`` Watson says.